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Letters and Back-at-ya
My pal Eeo asked me to begin this letter page with a color key. ...Ok. BLUE is the (dated) voice of the narrator of this letter page, and will hopefully provide the context for the letters.
BLACK is a letter Toc wrote to someone.
RED is a quoted voice ...or your voice (...and thanks).
Gray is a second generation letter included in a first generation black letter.
Green is my interpreter interpreting my words for little kids.
So ...
(11/15/01) Here
is a recent letter I got from a comic maker, and my response, (which of
course I would never send to her). I write such things mostly as a kind
of continuing pep talk for my friends about the future of comics. I thought
you might like its good quirk.
And the woman says:
Hi Toc,
Thanks for sending me
your comic and poster and the invite to your opening. As it turned out,
by the time ______ forwarded the mail to me, the opening was long over.
I'm sorry I missed it.
You've definitely got a well-developed style in the comic. Very involving.
I have to say I have no idea what was going on in the story and wish I
did, but it seems you are choosing to be oblique for some reason, and
that's obviously a choice you are free to make. In general, I'm interested
in comics that communicate strongly and clearly, instead of staying very
much in their own world, so it's not exactly my cup of tea, but good luck
with it. I hope your Diamond solicitation went over well.
Best,
__________
PS letter not for publication or dispersal.
Hello Ms ___________
So you really
didn't get it?
It does expect a bigger commitment on the part of readers, (that is some
of my point), but I would have imagined you would have gotten it immediately.
Give it another go sometime, and imagine it as a kind of mutant poetry
in which the most private story you can recognize in it is your story.
A problem I see in
comics is that of shallow immersion, comics seem so short lived, very
rarely worth a second read because they never rise above entertainment.
I have always been addicted to comics, always looking for something, and
strangely always disappointed at how consistently poor they are. I have
made art all my life and would never show any comics to friends because
they would scoff at the bland and timid drawings, they would say, "Well
…let's look at these ('weak images') next to the grand immediacy
of something like … Vermeer or Agnes Martin. Let's read some of this
dialogue, and then read some Joyce or Kazantzakis. Now… with the
utter shortness of your tiny fucking life, which of these is worthy of
your attention?" You get the drift. You are never done reading Vermeer
or Joyce, because the criteria by which they worked was aimed at the soul
which is relatively bottomless.
Are there novels you have read more than once? I have read some books
over ten times, some of Robertson Davies, some Woolf, some Joyce. But,
other than Jim Woodring, (Chris Ware, Max, some Francesca Germondi, some
Dave Sim, and few others), there are no comics I could read more than
twice, if twice. Lucky for me this is not a critique on your work because
I have not read your work yet. I sent you the invitation and V3.1, because
I saw a wonderful cover you did. It felt good, and I thought you would
be happy to know that there was someone else pushing comics out of its
beshited nest.
I have chosen a rather small audience by my work, but I'm not trying to
live off my comics, (as a strange matter of fact I am trying to live off
my art in order to do comics, [isn't that odd?]). So I think to my self;
well ...seeing that I will die pretty soon, do I want to produce a quantity
of work for a fat-sized audience (who long to get one of their sugar-plums
letters printed). Or do I want to carefully tell the story of the independent
life of my soul to Brancusi, Neruda, Martin, Rilke, and The Grand Circus
Psyche. Obviously I've chosen the Circus. "Damn everything but the
circus" (eec). That is my audience. You may feel, from my first comic
that I am nowhere near this attempt but I am certain that you would applaud
my desire to jump.
I feel like I think there are many ways to communicate, there is the day-lit and clear linear narrative of Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Irving, and it sounds like this way is your way as well. I love that cup of tea. But there is also a darker way, the multiple coupled snakings of surrealism, the dreaming poetry of Neruda, Lorca, Thomas, Mirabai and Rumi. I am from the deciduous north, cold for six months a year but this dark warm dreaming is my place too.
Maybe this gap between comics and art is really just the question; who is its audience?
Thanks for the tea
Your pal Toc
PS - You can quote me anytime. If I said it … it is because I said it.
Funny stuff, uh?
The following was my invitation to a my favorite comic maker to come to
my show 9/13/01
Well…Yikes! Caught
in my own reflection, I am! I can't imagine you will be there at my opening,
it is definitely too far even for me. I suppose I'll have to be there.
I'll be the one in the corner with the eyes of a snaked horse, I'll be
mute for fear of splitting my tongue, I'll be the one with a hand covering
his ugly teeth fearing to frighten the flowers, I'll be the one searching
every word for the back of my eyes.
Art is a disguise we've put on just to have our say. It is so embarrassing,
but what choice do we have. The air whispers by kidding at our hair, the
first drop of rain parts our lips, mud hugs mud to our feet and climbs
us, flicked up to our ankles, and the fire leans towards where ever we
sit. It's a fucking conspiracy from the elements down! I think …my
comics are for readers ten to twenty years from now, and my comics will
be there waiting for them. A plague of entertainment will kill off a generation,
and then …kids will get hungry, and will begin to forage and what's
left of …you and I, we'll be waiting. The (human) soul is a scavenger,
and loves nothing so much as a quiet softening corps.
I
was listening to a voice in the air (I like to listen), and I told him
that someone had asked me if I really heard voices. We laughed, and he
said, "If you don't, than you're crazy."
Thank you for your encouragement, and allowing Elizzy to quote you, I
take it to heart and keep it there. Good baddogs remember. If you-guys
are ever near Woodstock please come see us, the twins have a spare-oom
and you are always welcome to stay as long as you can take-it.
With
love and admiration
Your pal
Toc
(8/1/02 Critic's are of
course welcome to critique my work for who ever wants to hear it …
but I don't … please. If you don't like what I do that's fine ...America;
live and let live, and definitely go find something you do like.
There are just a hand full of people (I know with enough detail to feel
their motivations) that I trust to talk about my work, and even then it
would be a very careful conversation. So thanks anyway and no critiques
today thanks. But ...I am open to any vote of confidence. [Friendliness
is Dog-holy].
True anarchist believes deeply in polite-ness, respect and
willingness, because they honestly know how close the animal is. The passion
of compassion is a formal dance.
The following is a note to a critic that
never panned)
Hello_________
At the_________ site it said that you write for them? I need some kind of perking to get my comics out into the...world so I thought if you liked the quirk of my site www.tocfetch.com you might consider lauding me with some kind words.
I try to live under the name Toc Fetch because he is an honest man. He is not …real in the common sense of the word but if I could feel effortlessly honest I would be Toc Fetch. As it is I make comics about him, and try to live somewhat under him, and sometimes in hindsight I am him.
Hello, my name is Toc Fetch, I make comics. I was first published in `99 by L'assocation, Paris, in "Lapin" No.24 (viva) I have finished eight comics to date, printed three of them so far, published two, and I just got a grant from the Xeric Foundation to print my fourth called "Facts of Life, V5 No1." This will come out in November. I decided to place a full page add in Artforum for the ha in November that will cost almost twice as much as the printing of the comic. Somehow funny… that (and I am still unsure whether I am fawning for attention or thumbing my nose, both as one ...probably, and typical).
My third comic was published for my opening at The Ricco/Maresca gallery in Chelsea NYC, 9/13/01, (this timing was so bad that it achieved a feeling like a mythic wink). I began that comic; "Kids of Lower Utopia," in the spring of 2000 and finished in the summer of 2001. It is number two in its series, and I am now working on number three. It is pencil on paper, and the original pages measure 33" x 51", it is a monster.
It is a story told in staged Haiku(s), earmarked moments of realization in the life of my fierce and snarling little soul as told from the vantage of a woman: River Scout Finnagain. Each page was made to stand alone and …all together as a comic. The actual language is pure American mutt. A crossbreed made up of part direct-observation, part axiomatic poetry, part implied photo-faith, and all summed up in a language of graphite velocity vectors (grow-language) under the influence of comic-read and cheek.
Even some comic readers ask me what-the-hell is going on in my comics, as if they, of all people, do not remember reading images as a kid before words swallowed the world. As if words are more true than images. Asking the permission of words to understand what they see is to me a sad backwards. As if flying equals jumping off a cliff. As if an apple does not taste if you don't know it's name. And yet, still, when you close your eyes and hear a generic word like "dog" you don't see a word, you don't see an abstraction, you see a very specific dog and the hinting trajectory of it's story, because reading images is preliterate, it is the language of the subconscious, the soul. PapaWolf says, 'Trust the soul to tell the story because that story will be thee story.
And so, for the sake of contradicting, my Self I've done Footnotes for "AnOther Piece, V3 No1," and "Kids of Lower Utopia,V6 No1" I was amazed by the use of footnotes in the comics of C. Speed McNeil, as if such a guide was somehow forbidden (a residue from my years in 'fine-art' as in: art is beyond explanation), so I have compiled footnotes (of-a-kind) for these two books at www.tocfetch.com.
My website represents my comics. The Ricco/Maresca Gallery (www.riccomaresca.com) represents my pencil drawings, V6 No2, and No3 (and they are righteously expensive). My inks (V1 through V6 No1) are represented by Elizzy Cline (ecline@ulster.net) up here in Woodstock, and her prices are fairly mean as well. I may make comics but what is left over is art, (a bit of well dried humor in that). Very expensive and not very proletariat …is it? But hey …I just want to make comics. And after I've made the comic what does it matter where the O-pages go. As PopeJoey said, "If you can't print it you're on the wrong side."
Thanks for looking. "Hi-ho."
You pal (with friendly tension)
Toc Fetch
The Facts of Life V5 No1
(8/31/02. I got an E-mail from, the heroic, Scott McCloud telling me of a conversation that had accrued on the web about my work [begun by Matt Silvie..., thanks Matt]. It did last but a moment but anything is something. Some of the voices were kind towards my work, and someone brought up an issue I also had to wrestle with long ago when I was a kid. I seemed to still own some energy in these thoughts so I offered it to Scott McCloud. And here to you.)
Hello Scott McCloud
Thanks you for your kind words, like sudden water.
So here is my latest comic. And that really
is my son Jyothi (the-light-that-calls-the-gods-together-and-makes-them-behave).
Who now calls himself Ramsey (from Davies' Fifth Business). When Jyothi
was first registering for high school he introduced himself to the principal
as "Ramsey", hearing this for the first time, Eeo-his-mom didn't
blink, (slipping into improv-mode, not to be outdone by her son) so that
became his name.
Ramsy is a father now too … o-sweet-repetition.
From that discussion on line:
I am so glad someone immediately implied that antiquated notion of tracing as dishonorable among gentlemen draftsmen. "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake," said Steven Dedalus. It is this same tired notion that makes historical anthropologists search through all that is left of Vermeer and DA Vinci to find evidence of the camera obscura in their work. Or Eaken's neurotic attempt to hide the clues of his use of photographs. Durer, Caravaggio, Ingres, Warhol, Hockney to name a few of the better known who used the camera lucida, in fact photography grew directly out of the camera lucida through Talbot's dissatisfaction with his own drawing by this optical technique. And when we look at Vermeer now will we feel any less sublime for knowing how he arrived at his images? The Fuck-No!
I, far-more-than, believe in technology, she and I are way beyond that … we're having sex … frequently. And we are so high on the endorphin that we couldn't care less who sees it. And besides …I have never thought of my self as a draftsman, if anything I am more like a singular insular (very-low-budget) noir-stylie film maker. Except that I shoot nothing but "still-points," I go to the exact place a film would be leading you to and wait there gathering silence as an image. My stories absolutely cannot be told better in another medium, nothing holds the silent life of observation better than pencil (and ink is the next best thing if…in low end printing).
And a voice in my head once said "If you can't print it you're on the wrong side (of who I am)."
There is this …Thing, very like gravity in its scale. I call it, for lack of other wise, the "grow factor," it is life as movement; everything comes into being as movement (the universe, the body, time etc.). What the Upanishads call "Being-becoming." It is really a "becoming factor" and if you look for it (through drawing) you can become accustomed to seeing it, recognizing it (re - cognizing it), everywhere. The interesting part of this observation is that there is only one "scientific" (as in repeatable) tool subtle enough to record its existence and that tool is the pencil. The pencil in hand is the one tool that can decipher and speak this language. In my work I want the animal of the medium to interpret my stories, and it is important to note that she does not fit me, I fit her.
I love the shortcuts that technology offers me (with kisses and winks). With my digital camera I can gather more info on location than I'll ever use and then down load immediately to see if I have what I need, and if not then we are immediately back to it, it is very live. (Do you know how heart wrenchingly slow this same process is in film? I do, I make my living in NYC's local 52. Ask Hal Hartley how almost impossible it is to make personal art with the insistence of five million bucks and the timing of a 100 man crew jingling their two cents). Film doesn't suit me as an art form, too many hands touching the animal. But I require film as a tool because I am so utterly in love with Direct Observation in light (it is religious), and film can document this very once-upon-a-time in its inductive short hand (Photo-faith), from which I have learned to deductively read. These short cuts allow me to cut a job down from what would be a year (among gentlemen draftsmen) to a month (among the proletariat).
What I have done is to redefine comics as what …I do (as opposed to what is done). I have redefined the very audience of comics before they even exist, and yes to back my self up, in my definition, I have a day job. According to my definition comics are at the beginning of a change that will be obvious in ten more years of hindsight, and all because it is a humble art … that travels (this to me is the pivot). Comics will be co-opted by art, because art is voracious, always looking for a way to extend the life of its live-voice into to a larger more live and direct audience.
...
Thanks again for your kindness
Your pal
Toc Fetch
9/18/02 Out of that conversation on the web one woman wrote the best complement I've ever received so I sent her some comics as thank you. Then I got this letter in return. And now this woman (my pal) is most-defiantly sitting in My audience among all the Dead I can carry. James sitting beside her, nudges her, and says, "Go ahead dear read it out loud."
Yeah... he calls me dear too.
A king's gift of comics arrived on my back step today. Honestly, this is what I get for saying what I thought, that your comics remind me of Joyce's river run? I feel rich.
My poor gift back will be in the mail to you shortly.
In the meantime, Toc, here is a poem by Osip Mandelshtam (a poet who, like Joyce, worked in the sounds and roots below his language) translated by Richard & Elizabeth McKane. I heard its music in Mongo's letter to his son.
"To Natasha Shtempel"
I.
Limping against her will over the deserted earth,
with uneven, sweet steps,
she walks just ahead
of her swift friend and her fiancé'.
The restraining freedom
of her inspiring disability pulls her along,
but it seems that her walking is held back
by the charity of a concept:
that this spring weather
is the ancestral mother of the grave's vault,
and that this is an eternal beginning.
II.
There are women, who are so close to the moist earth,
their every step is a loud mourning,
their calling is to accompany the resurrected,
and to be first to greet the dead.
It is a crime to demand kisses from them,
and it is impossible to part from them.
Today angels, tomorrow worms in the graveyard,
and the day after, just an outline.
The steps you once took, you won't be able to take.
Flowers are immortal. Heaven is integral.
What will be is only a promise.
Toc, don't worry if there are people who do not understand your comics and put them aside. There is room for them and for you both. I am bad at riddles but I found that Ulysses was an easy read, so long as I read it quickly and on the edge of sleep, for I was raised to assume that I was capable of understanding. Not everyone thinks that way, and for them there are still plenty of comics. It's good that you are doing what you are doing, though. It makes me proud that someone is making comics that are beautiful to the waking eye and yet might best be understood by a mind half dreaming. I'd hate to think that the only place to find your work would be in the Hicksville library of comics never written; it's a pure miracle that instead they are here, gleaming and glossy, in my hand.
Best,
Sara
(...wow... my pal)
Does this sound egomaniacal, my including her letter? (A friend told me it does.) I really debated whether or not to put this letter up because it could sound like I am attempting to shin my horn. But there are two worthy things this letter offers. One is that her voice is so beautifully aware, open ended and rightly-confident. (But of course she reads poetry which says a lot for her in this time. Do you?) The second thing is that of presenting her as an alternative to mediocrity and the generally accepted claustrophobic reality of comics.
Still …you don't know whether I'm a good witch or a bad witch. And really I am much further than egomaniacal. I am an egoist which is to say, a mere conduit for a reality more worthy than just my self. I am possessed by it. And 'it' is a place in my soul called Lower Utopia
All and all I am hoping that you will recognize your self in me and just enjoy the stylie of my reminder.
12/1/02, I just got this note from a new pal, I thought at first of making a cyber page out of it, it being such a cool image in its self but I am just now lost in a new project and don't plan to breath again for a year. So...
Toc... I've been reading your website so much that this morning I dreamt that I woke up and told my roommate that I needed to wash my Samudhi (which I know doesn't make sense, but that's what I said) because I'd been wearing this one for weeks. Then I went to get back in bed and discovered that I had left my face on the pillow when I had gotten up. There it lay like a mask. It even had strings. I wasn't even surprised to see it there. I just kind of shrugged my shoulders then picked it up, tied it back on and went back to sleep. Weird, huh?
-Jenni
Cool uh?
I have learned that it is some what rude to interpret images from Dream, not so much rude to the dreamer as rude to the image. Rationally interpreting dream is a bit like using a sledge hammer to open a ripe avocado. The "Meaning," of the image, is the visual feeling of the image touching everything in the daylight. Interpretation kills the image, and that is its point. The rational mind fears the unknown, the unknowable, security is it's primary axiom, security is a smiling crocodile in a brown shirt.
Dream on.
12/21/02 I got a letter and a comic from Nathan. I've never met him except through the words and images of his first comic and letters. Wonderful stuff, defining the edges of comics and all that, he is like me, his comics will be worth skaffing-up up if he makes more, and doesn't listen to the laughter of dull friends.
Toc-
Walking through the Art
Institute yesterday, I happened upon a small Persian color illustration
from 1650. The minuteness of the detail in this small painting stunned
me -- it was unlike anything I'd seen produced in the west. Only someone
with a profoundly mystical intensity could have mustered the technical
dedication to produce such a tiny revelation. Imagine your own comics
reduced by another 50%, and you can imagine the detail of the line work
in this image. I don't even know whether this kind of painting would reproduce
well in a book, because the average dot screen is probably larger than
the line work. And 1650 was long before any kind of photographic reproduction.
Perhaps the painters used magnifying glasses; optics and lens production
were just beginning to become widespread in the seventeenth century, at
least in Europe.
It reminds me of something that James Elkins, a professor at my school,
once said: "It's increasingly rare to find complex images that need
to be studied or pondered instead of just seen all at once and discarded.
That is a pity -- it's an impoverishment of our visual culture -- because
the truly complex images show just what images are capable of doing."
Not long ago I told one of my friends that I also wanted to make comic
books. She laughed. So I said I was just kidding. The problem is that
comics have so much potential, but they've been swallowed by the culture
of Hollywood and television. Like that comic artist who told you she didn't
like your comics because she preferred works that "communicate strongly
and clearly." As strongly and clearly as the latest dumb movie, right?
To be seen all at once and discarded. Or, if viewed again, to be seen
only as a cheap thrill, like the cult film that someone has seen fifteen
times. Comics are the underground double of the mass media, a ghetto medium
doubly spurned by the cognoscenti. Even children's picture books have
a higher literary reputation than comics. But the longer I search for
something worthwhile in comics, the more I come to believe that their
bad reputation is deserved. Toc, your comics are, unfortunately, the exception
that proves the rule.
So I've decided it's not true that I want to make comics, but something
stranger and more delightful. Like Joyce, whose last book is not really
a novel, nor is it poetry. Or Roland Barthes, whose last books transcended
both literary criticism and literature. And both of whom created something
that you have never finished reading.
What I love about your work -- and what I aspire to in my own, very nascent
studies -- is this meaningful complexity. I can still return to the first
comic of yours that I found so improbably (v4n1) and it is just as new
and open as the first day I opened it. It never stops making meaning.
This is what good images should be (when coupled with a receptive mind):
perpetually new, continually delightful, infinite meaning generators.
Surprise itself.
Nathan
Wow! ............... Nathan ... is most definitely my friend, and neighbors in Lower Utopia.
...or read on below
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